Neat-Image and RawTherapee

Software RawTherapee
1

Since I learnt to use the extremest good de-noising tool Neat-Video for my video productions, I bought it also as Neat-Image for de-noising of photos during preprocessing my photos with RawTherapee. I very appreciate RawTherapee! But the de-noising of Neat-Image is magic with my Sony camera photos.

Really nice to have would be Neat Image as a plug-in in RawTherapee. Reason for this: The current workflow is:

  • Load raw-original file into RawTherapee
  • Do only demosaicing (neutral profile)
  • Save it as TIFF 16 bit (about 0.12GByte per 20Mpixel-photo).
  • Open one or more TIFF file(es) with Neat Image and configure the denoising.
  • Denoise and save as TIFF 16 Bit (additionally about 0.12 GByte per 20Mpixel-photo since PNG doesn’t save EXIF data)
  • Open this with RawTherapee for developing with all of the many parameters to get a good image.

My suggestion is: Neat-Image (and -Video) is also available as plug-ins for some software. Maybe there is not really big effort to make a plug-in for RawTherapee. In this case, RawTherapee would get a good focused place for people which are interested in Neat-Image. In this case Neat would make advertise for RawTherapee.

The good other way would be to implement the experience of Neat directly into RawTherapee. But I’m afraid that either this is a very complex topic with a lot of know how, or there are some patents on the algorithms.

What’s your opinion?

Best regards, Frank.

2

some ‘thoughts’:
1.) NeatImage is good (at least is was good in past, didn’t try since 3 years) in noise removal.
2.) RT is also good in noise removal (don’t know if it’s as good as current NeatImage)
3.) NeatImage is commercial
4.) RT is open source
5.) RT doesn’t support plugins
6.) If RT would support plugins and NeatImage plugin would make advertise for RT, there would be no win-win, but only a win for NeatImage, because RT is free.

1 Like
3

Have you tried other methods for noise reduction? Such as dark frame subtraction or wavelet decompose?

4

Hello,
I also have Neat Image (free version) and I have the same results on RT and Neat Image.
Did you much tried the RT tools?
(I don’t use Neat Image anymore).

5

See “Usage”
http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Noise_Reduction

1 Like
6

I think Neat Image uses the same method for Denoising.
It uses Wavelets (Or other Multi Scale Filter Bank) and Thresholding.

It seems that with a joint work one could create some results or even better on RT (Since it uses Directional Filter Banks).

Anyone want to try working on it?